Angels with Clean Faces

Photos courtesy of the mysterious “Shaw” who lives in a little 70s timewarp, though of course in the 70s these angels would have had the traditional dirty faces…

I still haven’t seen the revealed cherubs in all their gaudy splendour yet, but they certainly look, um, clean. Perhaps the colour change is most stark from a distance:

For some reason I thought the whole portico was being cleaned, rather than the only things that, arguably, shouldn’t have been. Perhaps that bit will come later. Certainly the whole of the East end could do with a spruce up. But it’s certainly a church of many colours at the moment, what with the gleaming tower, grubby main building and gleaming cherubs. Shaw tells me there’s a layer of mottled paint around the bases to add an extra part of the spectrum.

It was always going to be a tough call cleaning the sad cherubs. Personally, I wouldn’t have bothered – surely by now the dirt would formed some kind of protective layer on their poor, withered faces. Scrubbing them up seems to have made them only look even more vulnerable. I guess cleaning the rest of the portico might make them look a little less ‘stand-out.’

Just to remind you, this is what the pitiful putti looked like before the transformation:

and here is Shaw’s pic of the newly-revealed version:

Based on the flashes I got on Wednesday and these pictures, I’m really not sure about how the sad cherubs have turned out. But hey – perhaps they look better in real life…

the attachments to this post:

DSCF0094

Sad cherub

new cherubs 2

New cherubs

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 28th, 2012 at 11:48 am and is filed under Debates, st alfeges. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

3 Comments to “Angels with Clean Faces”

Personally I would have thought that the cleaning process would have caused a heap more damage – the “experts” on Antiques Roadshow are always berating people for over-enthusiastic cleaning. But hey, we can’t have all those thousands of people streaming into Greenwich Park for the 2012 equestrian events thinking that we don’t give a shred for our architectural heritage, can we?

There’s a lot of atmospheric pollution in Greenwich and its only going to be a matter of time before the smuts start accumulating again. Of course, the fact that bits of the church are now so pristine will only highlight any new grubbiness – its like getting a mark on a new jumper or something; its always more visible (to the wearer, anyway) than if you’d dribbled something down the front of your favourite sloppy joe.

Perhaps this would be a good time to ask the Council to repair the clock on the nearby tower? And spruce the library up a bit?

I think they were damned if they did clean them up and damned if they didn’t.
It is their millennium after all and I’m sure there were ‘moaners’ when the tower got done.
I would assume that the body of the Church will be spruced up before the April Celebrations commence??!!